The Ongoing United States War on Iran by Jacob G. Hornberger!
(2020-01-09 at 19:11:30 )

The Ongoing United States War on Iran by Jacob G. Hornberger

The Washington, D.C., establishment and the United States mainstream press continue to express concern about the possibility that war is going to break out between the United States and Iran. That is ridiculous. What they do not want to confront is that the United States government is already waging war against Iran and has been for many years.

After all, how else to describe the vicious and brutal United States economic sanctions on Iran? Those sanctions target the Iranian populace with death and economic impoverishment and have been tremendously successful in achieving that end.

Sure, it is not bombs, missiles, and bullets that are killing and destroying the Iranian people, like the way United States officials have been killing the people of Iraq and Afghanistan for decades. But make no mistake about it: A person who is killed because of sanctions is just as dead as the person killed by bombs, missiles, or bullets.

Sanctions have become such a commonplace tool in the foreign-policy arsenal of the United States government and its interventionist foreign policy that American interventionists do not give them a second thought. As long as the bombs are not falling and United States troops are not invading Iran, the fact that sanctions are killing the Iranian people is just considered by American interventionists as no big deal.

But it is a big deal.

The United States government has been - and is - knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately killing and destroying the Iranian people through economic sanctions.

If that is not war, what is it?

Moreover, sanctions are an illegitimate way of waging war because they target the populace of a country as a way to defeat their regime. Intentionally killing civilians in war has long been considered to be a war crime.

After all, is that not one of the reasons we condemn terrorism - because it targets innocent people with death as a way to achieve a political end?

Well, that is precisely what sanctions are intended to do - to squeeze the Iranian people to death as a way to coerce or manipulate their government to bend to the will of United States officials.

Given that the United States government is killing Iranians, why is Iran not counter-attacking by killing Americans?

Is that not what ordinarily happens in war - both sides kill each other?

The answer is that Iranian officials are not dumb. They know that Iran is an impoverished Third World country that is being attacked by the most powerful regime in world history.

Iranian officials know that if they starting counterattacking by killing Americans, the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency will unleash their massive arsenal of bombs, missiles, and bullets on their country, bringing the same massive death and destruction to Iran that the United States national-security state has brought to Iraq and Afghanistan.

We saw this sanctions and bombing phenomenon in Iraq.

The United States interventionist state intervened in the Persian Gulf War in 1990, during which the United States government massacred thousands of Iraqis.

During that intervention, the Pentagon also intentionally destroyed the countrys water-and-sewage treatment systems with the aim of spreading infectious illnesses among the Iraqi people.

Then, for the next 11 years, United States officials imposed and enforced a vicious and brutal system of economic sanctions on the Iraqi people, with the aim of forcing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power.

But after the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from the sanctions, Saddam had still not left office. That is when United States officials used their post-9-11-01 invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam from power, which was when the killings of Iraqis by bombs, missiles, and bullets resumed.

The fact is that from the inception of the Persian Gulf intervention through the post-9-11-01 invasion of Iraq, the United States government was continuing to kill Iraqis with its sanctions, just as it killed Iraqis with bombs, missiles, and bullets before, during, and after the sanctions.

What we need to confront is not simply the fact that the United States interventionist state kills foreigners through such specific policies as sanctions, state-sponsored assassinations, coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, invasions, wars of aggression, and occupations.

To restore liberty, privacy, morality, prosperity, and harmony to our land, we need to confront the paradigm of foreign interventionism itself, including its policy of sanctions, and bring it to an end.

Reprinted here with permission from Mr. Jacob G. Hornberger of The Future of Freedom Foundation!! Their Great Website!!